It was in Suleika Jaouad’s searing account of her battle with leukemia that I first encountered Susan Sontag’s words on health and sickness: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Jaouad was in her twenties, and fought through four years of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants before reaching remission and asking herself that unexpected question, “How do I live again?” The title of her book is, aptly enough, Between Two Kingdoms. Her story has stayed with me since, but it was Sontag’s depiction of one of the most fundamental human dichotomies that continued to resonate most.

Living with a chronic illness, I’ve traveled between the kingdom of health and the kingdom of sickness.